OpenAI Proves ETH Is False, and Crypto Twitter Has Questions

In brief

• OpenAI says its AI has proven that ETH is false—but it’s not the “ETH” crypto traders are thinking about.
• The company says its AI models have found a way to disprove the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a computer-science conjecture from 1999.
• Here’s what all that means, and what mathematicians are doing about it.

OpenAI says ETH is false, and Crypto Twitter reacted exactly the way you would expect. “Damn algo traders just slaughtered $ETH,” a user called Takumi posted on X, while Andrew Jiang quipped: “Vitalik has been real quiet since this came out.”

But chill out, degens, the ETH in question is the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a computer-science conjecture from 1999 that has nothing to do with Ethereum, its price, or co-founder Vitalik Buterin. So, crypto bros, you can breathe.

OpenAI published a 67-page paper claiming its AI found a way around the hypothesis, and the people who proposed it are now checking the work.

Computer scientists Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi proposed ETH with Francis Zane, and it says a classic logic puzzle called 3-SAT (finding true-or-false settings that satisfy a pile of rules, three options at a time) cannot be solved much faster than by trying every combination. Hundreds of papers assume it to show that problems in graph theory, computational biology, databases and geometry cannot be solved quickly, per OpenAI.